Recently I visited Bletchley Park, the location where Alan Turing lead the team that cracked the codes transmitted using the German Enigma and Lorenz Cipher during WWII. Learning about how the enigma worked, and how rudimentary it seemed to me got me thinking about how people of the future may think the same about current cryptographic methods. It’s easy to think of the Enigma to be a rudimentary machine without considering the computing power that was available at the time. The oldest working computer in the world (Harwell Computer), located at Bletchley Park, would take a year to perform a number of operations that a modern day smart phone could calculate in 100 ms.

Bitcoin addresses are generated randomly and consist of up to 35 alpha-numeric characters. There are 2160 possible different bitcoin addresses. To give that some perspective, there roughly 263 grains of sand on this planet. There are almost as many possible bitcoin addresses as there are atoms on earth. It is possible to have a custom address by randomly generating addresses until an address that meets the custom specification shows up. Github user samr7 has made a useful cryptographic brute-forcing tool that does exactly that, called vanitygen.

A windows 32 bit binary is available pre-compiled. However, I found it quite difficult to get to compile and run on the latest version of Mac OSX with the latest dependancies so I thought I’d make a quick guide. If you are running an older version of Mac OSX, you might not need to follow this guide, but you would still benefit from the performance increases from updating to the latest dependencies.

You’ve probably heard of bitcoin, the decentralised digital currency that is being reported increasingly more in the media recently. In this post I will talk about what they are, what makes them secure, and how to get them.

I’ve coded animation to make the lamp jump around and for a fireplace to flicker. I’ve also incorporated various textures into the scene. The lamp performs a larger jump when faced with an obstacle. Here’s the final results: